Cisco IPCC Express Edition meets the needs of departmental, enterprise branch, or small to medium-sized companies that need easy-to-deploy easy-to-use, highly available, and sophisticated customer interaction management for 1 to 300 agents. It is designed to enhance the efficiency, availability, and security of customer contact interaction management by supporting a highly available virtual contact center with integrated self-service applications across multiple sites secured with Cisco Security Agent. Its support for powerful agent-based assisted service as well as fully integrated self-service applications results in reduced business costs and improved customer response by providing sophisticated and distributed automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), computer telephony integration (CTI), and agent and desktop services in a single-server, contact-center-in-a-box deployment.

Cisco IPCC Express Edition Premium is ideal for full-featured formal call centers requiring skills-based routing, CTI-based agent screen pop, or integrated self-service application support; it can handle as few as a single agent or as many as 300 agents and 300 full-featured IVR ports*. Additional features and benefits include:

Matching the caller with the right agent the first time, creating call handling tailored to different classes of customers and even for individual customers, and providing flexible contact center operational profiles based on varying business needs are all critical requirements in providing high levels of customer satisfaction while maintaining cost-effective, efficient operations.

Skill groups can be defined to require agents with specific skills and competency levels within that skill. Every agent can be assigned up to 100 different skills differentiated by their competency (up to 10 levels of competency) in that skill. Every agent can be a member in multiple skill groups.

Sophisticated routing and rerouting algorithms include the following: data-driven routing based on customer data in enterprise databases; conditional routing, including time-of-day, day-of-week, holidays, automatic number identification (ANI), dialed number identification service (DNIS), customer-entered data, and custom-defined variables; wait time; calls in queue or other custom-defined variables; and overflow, intra-flow, and inter-flow routing.

The ability to move calls up or down in a call queue at any time under workflow control is provided by the Cisco IPCC Express Edition Premium call priority queuing feature. This feature adds significant capability to optimize customer contact management for specific classes of customers or even to target special handling for specific customers.

IVR Voice Menus and Queued Calls

Cisco IPCC Express Edition Premium provides advanced, programmable arbitrary depth voice menus and custom caller treatments in queue, including playing the number of calls in queue, expected wait time in queue, custom messaging, and options to prompt and collect customer-entered information as well as provision for callers to transfer to any other number or service, including voicemail.

IVR Support for Fully Automated Self-Service Solutions

Cisco IPCC Express Edition Premium provides support for integrating fully automated self-service applications using dual tone multi-frequency (DTMF), and advanced speech technologies such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies with the contact center. Other advanced technologies supported include integration with enterprise Websites for initiating features such as click-to-talk and real-time notification services for e-mail and, with third-party products, support for fax and paging services**.

CTI for Screen Pop

The unique, cost-effective CTI integration feature of Cisco IPCC Express Edition Premium brings CTI integration costs within reach for all contact center operators, including using caller-entered information as a key for an enterprise database access to retrieve detailed caller information for popping extensive information about the caller to the agent using any Microsoft Windows-based CRM or other application.

• Measure contact service queue (CSQ) performance using reports that provide information such as different types of service level by CSQ, queue statistics by CSQ, answer and abandon call distribution by CSQ, CSQ call counts, and CSQ call durations.

• Access detailed views on each contact made to the system through reports that provide information such as custom call variables tagged to each call and detailed call by call reports.

The Cisco IPCC Express Edition historical reporting client provides supervisors and call center managers with flexibility to display report data using features including date time range, sorting parameters, and filter parameters. Once reports are generated, the tool also provides the ability to manipulate the report output by scaling the report size and providing the ability to export the report data in file formats such as PDF, Excel, and XML for further data manipulation or presentation options. Through the job scheduler, users also have the ability to print or save scheduled reports at user defined date and time intervals.

Cisco IPCC Express Edition customers have the option of using Crystal Reports to build custom reports that are viewable through the Cisco IPCC Express Edition historical reporting client. Detailed documentation is provided to help customers understand the data presented on the standard reports, information on detailed data stored in the historical reporting database, and how to build custom reports for Cisco IPCC Express Edition.

Cisco Agent and Supervisor Desktop Services

The Cisco Agent Desktop and Cisco Supervisor Desktop are the agent and supervisor interfaces for Cisco IPCC Express Edition and Cisco IPCC Enterprise Edition. With a common desktop environment across these products, contact center training and business operations decisions can be made once and reused across products.

• Hot desking and extension mobility support-This feature gives organizations flexibility by allowing supervisors to sit at any available workplace while maintaining their unique settings.

CISCO IP PHONE AGENT FOR CISCO IPCC EXPRESS EDITION PREMIUM

Cisco IP Phone Agent (Figure 3) provides ACD functions on a Cisco IP Phone 7970G, IP Phone 7960G or IP Phone 7940G. The IP phone agent does not support all features of the agent desktop, but in many cases it eliminates the need for an agent desktop to be installed on the agent's PC.

Cisco IP Phone Agent features include:

• Call control using the Premium IP phone capabilities

• ACD states

– Log in and log out

– Ready or not ready

– Reason codes for log out and not ready

• Hot desking (extension mobility)

• Display of real-time statistics for number of calls in queue and longest call in queue

• Support for enterprise data pop

Cisco Supervisor Desktop control of IP Phone agents includes:

• Ability to monitor agent phone status in real time

• Ability to change the agent state-Supervisors can change an agent from logged in to logged out or from not ready to ready.

– Call Intercept-Supervisors can move any call from any agent to themselves.

Figure 3. Cisco IP Phone Agent

SERVICE CREATION AND SCRIPTING ENVIRONMENT

The Cisco IPCC Express Edition Workflow Editor is the service creation and scripting environment that helps enable complete customization of call-flow behavior and call treatments. It can be run from anyplace on the enterprise WAN, and workflows can be uploaded and run on the Cisco IPCC Express Edition server. This environment is a visual editor that provides a simple, easy-to-understand interface for building powerful, custom, business-communication applications. As Figure 4 illustrates, the service creation and scripting environment allows users to simply select a predefined call-flow component and drag and drop that component onto the current call-flow document. Users simply right-click on the dropped component to fill in component parameters.

Figure 4. Service Creation and Scripting Environment

ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES

Cisco IPCC Express Edition Premium provides Web-based administration fully integrated with that for Cisco CallManager. It can be administered from anywhere within an enterprise's Cisco AVVID WAN (Figure 5).

Maintaining security within networks is vital to Cisco, and to meet that requirement in the contact center and throughout the enterprise, Cisco IPCC Express Edition supports Cisco Security Agent as well as virus-detection software from the major antivirus software vendors. Cisco Security Agent is a host-based intrusion detection system that provides security to mission-critical enterprise servers and hosts. It goes beyond conventional endpoint security solutions such as virus scanning software and firewalls by identifying and preventing malicious behavior before it can occur, thereby removing potential known and unknown security risks that threaten enterprise networks and applications. By analyzing behavior rather than relying on signature matching, Cisco Security Agent complements the capabilities of the antivirus software and together they provide a robust solution to protect your network and reduce operational costs.

Contact center solutions can help your company dramatically improve customer service and increase business efficiencies. It is critical that your contact center be correctly deployed and effectively operated to help provide optimal contact center performance and improve customer satisfaction.

Cisco and its partners can help you ensure the deployment of a robust, dependable contact center solution by taking a lifecycle approach that addresses all aspects of deploying a multi-faceted solution including people, processes, and technology. Whether you are transitioning your existing contact center solution to an IP-based contact center or deploying a new IP contact center, this approach helps ensure alignment of business and technical goals at each of the six phases of the solution lifecycle: prepare, plan, design, implement, operate, and optimize.

Cisco services are available through various service programs designed to help accelerate customer success throughout the network lifecycle. For more information about Cisco services for contact center, visit
http://www.cisco.com/go/ipcservices or contact your local account representative.

SUMMARY

Cisco IPCC Express Edition offers an integrated, full-featured solution for managing customer voice contacts while retaining all the benefits of fully converged, IP telephony Cisco AVVID deployment. Cisco IPCC Express Edition meets the need for adjunct ACD as well as both formal and informal contact centers by delivering sophisticated call routing, management, and administration features for departmental, enterprise branch, or small to medium enterprise customer-care needs.

* The actual maximum number of agents and full-featured IVR ports that can be deployed on a given hardware server depends on the performance and capacities of that server as well as how many and what kind of other features are also deployed on that server. Your Cisco or Cisco partner account team can assist you in determining the maximum number of agents and prompt and collect ports for your deployment.

** May require integration with service provider or product providing the paging, e-mail, or fax service.

*** The actual maximum number of simultaneous recording and/or silent monitoring sessions that can be deployed on a given hardware server depends on the performance and capacities of that server as well as how many and what kind of other features are also deployed on that server. Your Cisco or Cisco partner account team can assist you in determining the maximum number of simultaneous recording and/or silent monitoring sessions available for your deployment.